It's been almost 3 weeks I didn't publish anything on my blog. I was so busy with my work here. We are now facing a new business environment after the earthquake and tsunami disaster. The market starts to recover slowly but we are worried about supplies and summer power shortage. First quarter budgets must be reconsidered because market is still shrinking. It will be a slow starting in the first quarter. However, I think after June the effect from recovery needs will rise rapidly, so we must be prepared for it. It will be really competitive to most of SME Companies to survive by scrambling limited market areas. I have to propose new strategies to create and deliver new value added product development and cost down kaizen planning. On the other hand, our new factory construction will be delayed for few months because we are facing steel shortage problem. My teams are trying our best to reduce delay. We have to calculate back the cost and risk that we will be facing from the delay. We have to renegotiate with all maker because of this delay. It's really a hard task for us to plan all over again.
Today I would like to write about “Seiri” which is one of the 5S process. I already explained about what 5S is and why you need to implement the 5S method in your organizations. You can read it in my previous post dated Jan 23, 2011.
The definition and simple explanation about Seiri will be as follows:
- Distinguish the necessary items from the unnecessary ones.
- Separate necessary from unnecessary information.
The first step of the "5S" process, Seiri, refers to the act of throwing away all unwanted, unnecessary, and unrelated materials in the workplace. The people involved in Seiri must not feel sorry about having to throw away things. The idea is to ensure that everything left in the workplace is related to work. Even the number of necessary items in the workplace must be kept to its absolute minimum. Simplification of tasks, effective use of space, and careful purchase of items follow because of Seiri.
It's simple isn’t? However this first step is the most difficult process to implement. I will explain the reason. First I would like to ask you few questions:
[1] What is necessary and unnecessary thing in your work place? Can you identify it easily?
[2] Is there are any Information, Documents, Products, Tools, etc... that you don’t really use it frequently but you have to keep it, in case somebody ask you or maybe you need it for future usage?
[3] Is there any things that u hold/save that you don’t know why you have to hold/save it?
[4] Is there any dead stock or slow moving inventory in your factory that you have to keep it because of salesman or managers ask to keep it?
There are a lot of questions I can ask, but my point is that Seiri is about “throwing away” and for that we must b e aware what is necessary and unnecessary. If we really do see around us, there are a lot of things that we don’t really need for the work purpose but we feel safe and convenient if we keep it. It's our nature to feel safe but unfortunately this will slow down the innovation process.
Why throwing is so important? Imagine you don’t throw your garbage, your house will be full with garbage and it will be really smelly. So how do we identify garbage? We never even think about it, we will throw it unconsciously. If our house is full of garbage we cannot live in it, we lost a lot of spaces, we cannot relax because of the rotten smell and we will be sick. How can we be happy with our beloved family in this kind of environment? However there are some people that feels comfortable with a lot of garbage in their houses, I had seen few, many times in TV.
Whether we realize it or not, actually it works as same as in our organization, “Garbage” in our organization are never going to smell and it make us comfortable. However our mind will lose a lot of spaces and we will start losing the creativity without even realizing it. Throw means to be lean, to create new space in our workplace/business. Peter Drucker had taught us that the first step of the innovation is to throw away the hackneyed things/matters systematically. We need to focus on growing fields to achieve continuous innovation and for that we must throw unnecessary things out from our business.
Seiri is a basic philosophy to be lean. It is not easy to lean because most of us will have desire to stay maintain in current situation (Mechanism for the maintenance of the status quo). We need space to change but we will feel discomfort to change. In other word we will feel discomfort when we need to be change. For most of us, our problem isn’t that we don’t know what we need to do differently or what we need to do better. For most of us, we simply don’t act on what we know to be true. Why not? Because doing what is right often requires that you do what is uncomfortable. The discomfort is not without its reward. As it turns out, the longer you continue to take the actions that are uncomfortable, the more comfortable they become–especially as our results improve. After you have taken the new actions long enough, it becomes uncomfortable to go back to what you were doing before. It becomes difficult to go back to do what you knew to be wrong. You can never reach this point if you aren’t willing to take new actions based on what you knew to be right.
By Implementing Seiri you will be trained to deal with changes. Like I have said earlier, before you start Seiri you must be aware and understand your mission in the organization. First we must really understand our organization vision, if you are in management board or owner of a business, make sure your employees understand the vision and make sure their missions are clear. Improvement begins with the willingness to take new actions and to adopt new and better behaviors. In order to know that what you are doing is wrong and to continue to do so is no better than not knowing. Changes is never easy. Most of the companies that wanted to apply 5S do not really understand about 5S, most of them implement 5S for make their company look clean and tidy. I had seen many CEOs and board who speak about 5S but they do not really believe that 5S methods will change their management system and gain profit for them. Implementing Seiri needs you to be aware of environment changes, you need to have courage and take responsibility if you really want to define unnecessary things and throwing it out. That’s how 5S journey will begin your organizations.
I hope that you will understand about Seiri from my explanation. It is really important to understand the philosophy before you adopt the methods. Otherwise you will lose yourself when hard challenges occur during the implementation process. I will explain about some method to implement Seiri in future post.
